There seems to be a large segment of the population that is underinformed on this issue, and it’s making it easy for the Republicans.
Scapegoating is common. Go back and read the board in summer of 2008 and you’ll see the exact same rubbish blaming George W Bush for high gas prices and a lot of conspiracies about how Bush wanted to make his oil buddies in Texas even wealthier.
Deep down everyone already knows the president doesn’t control gas prices. It doesn’t matter. They’ll claim its the president’s fault when a D is in office and some other reason (probably D policies against drill baby drill) when an R is in office. The truth is irrelevant because it feels true.
Not to mention … a PSA? Something that runs on broadcast TV (that fewer people than ever watch) at hours when most of those dwindling numbers are asleep?
What you’d need would be something like the Lincoln Project – a sharply produced video series that hammers home the same idea in a number of different ways and is clever enough to get shared on social media. But even then, 99% of the people viewing and sharing them would be people who already agree.
Besides, what you’re talking about is really a lesson in global macroeconomics, and if Americans had any ability (or desire) to understand that we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
It seems like Democrats would be doing this more if they thought it would make a difference. The fact is that the President gets the blame for high gas prices regardless of whether it’s deserved.
I actually tend to agree that on some deeper level, most people do know the President doesn’t control gas prices. Gas prices are a club, and when you dislike someone, and the club is available, you’re going to use it. This isn’t an argument that is won with information or explanation.
It also is more of a Republican club than a Democratic one. There are likely cultural reasons for that, but when gas prices have been high in Republican administrations, Democratic media and politicians make much less of a fuss over it than Republicans do in the converse situation (part of that is frankly because Republicans promote the idea that gas prices always being as low as possible at the pump is a positive.)
It should be noted most other Western democracies don’t have nearly such a baited-breath focus on pump prices. That isn’t to say soaring prices at the pump have never carried political consequences elsewhere–they have, but just to a much less degree than here. One reason is most of the Western world, taxes make up a much larger share of the pump price. When more of the pump price is made up of taxation, the part that fluctuates due to the global price of oil is less, so the swings seem less dramatic.
Additionally, many other countries that maintain high pump taxes, will actually reduce them temporarily in periods of surging global oil prices, to alleviate the pump shock. We don’t really have that tool because our pump taxes are hilarious low, and basically haven’t moved Federally in decades, and in many states the same can be said. The upside is over long run, we pay a lot less per gallon pumped, but we also have bigger swings, and some people choose to make that a political weapon.
What I find interesting is people (especially Republicans) go ape shit over pump prices, but have been content to see housing costs soar ever hire for basically over a decade straight, and housing is for most families a much bigger share of the household budget than transportation. However no one seems to actually blame politicians for the cost of housing–even though to be frank, our housing affordability crisis has a much greater relationship with government policy decisions than does the pump price.
All the non-right wing newscasts already explain that rising gas prices are not Biden’s fault. Adding a bump to a waterfall won’t make the sound any louder.
When prices at the pump go up, the MAGA crowd veritably begs for Socialism.
Charming.
Well, imho part of it is. After all Big Oil wants Biden OUT!, and high gas prices will help with that,
Thanks, Obama!
I thought I corrected “bump” to “burp.” Sigh.
Part of it is you can’t prove a negative. It’s really the 'pubs job to show how Biden is doing it, not the dem’s job to prove that he is not.
I also thing this is part of it, it seems obvious to me that there is collusion by those who can control oil supply (and thus price) to make the price of oil higher when democrats are in power, and lower when republicans are, most likely because the republicans set things up so these people can make overall more money and greater control. Right now they are very upset with the dem’s and want to kill the EV and doing everything in their power to get the republicans back in power to kill it for them. But collusion is very hard to prove and not considered helpful to come forward without the hard proof.
But how would the Republicans do that? Besides explicitly forbidding their sale or putting such a high excise tax that virtually no one would buy them? I don’t see either of these as politically possible. There are Republican politicians who actually like EVs and who would oppose such measures. And with the current gas prices, EVs are more popular than ever. Demand is way through the roof, to the point that at least one Ford dealer put a 100% markup on F-150 Lightnings. I don’t know if they actually managed to sell any at that price, but it indicates roughly how high any tax would have to be to kill EV sales.
So what else could they do to kill off the EV?
I’ve seen several articles, videos, and meme posts explaining this very issue. But the folks that need to see it aren’t, because they don’t want to. You can lead a clown to the fountain of knowledge, but you can’t make him fill his seltzer bottle.
I think the general sentiment can be summed up: Biden is the President and leader of the Democrat party. The Democrat party is against oil drilling because of the global warming hoax. So that’s why gas prices are so high. Ergo, blame Biden.
Let me sum up your summing up:
Biden is the President and leader of the Democrat party. Ergo, blame Biden.
I think that such a PSA would be counterproductive. All it’d do would be to create an association between “Biden is President” and “gas price are high”. The fact that it’s a negative association would be lost on the vast majority of subconsciouses.
The message isn’t “Biden is not responsible for gas prices”. It’s “Trump’s buddy Putin is responsible for gas prices”. It’s not as though this is a situation where there isn’t somebody specific who is responsible.
Here in the US, with highly inelastic gas demand with respect to prices, I’d almost favor increasing gas taxes when oil prices go up due to supply shock, so that the government gets more of the windfall revenue as opposed to the oil companies, who are making more money without doing more work.
Be really nice to push some of that windfall tax revenue into clean energy subsidies.
Too many people see their house as a potential piggybank/their retirement nest egg to consider it as a cost.
When house prices go up, people feel rich because their house is worth sooooooo much money. Never mind that the number of people who can buy their house becomes more and more restricted, meaning that when it come time for them to sell there will be fewer and fewer buyers at such high prices.
Eventually, when the housing market outpaces the ability of people to buy houses, we see a crash - or, at least, simple stagnation as people don’t have the wherewithal to make moves because they are trapped in houses that aren’t worth nearly what they paid for them.
You also tend to see more investor money going into buying up houses rather than building new ones - or new housing in general. I saw some people on our local Nextdoor try to organize a rent strike - I felt like telling them they should put pressure on their councilmembers to crack down on the bureaucracy and make the permitting practice easier to navigate, so that that investor money can make better returns in the kind of multifamily residential real estate that there is real demand for in our area. Of course, that would be unpopular with the homeowners who see that growth happening near them and worry about property values, and they’re a political bloc that’s hard to cross. So we’re back to where we started.
Yes, and if you own a house (either fully paid off or with locked-in mortgage rates), your own personal housing costs aren’t going up. If you rent, your housing costs would go up if and when your landlord decides to raise your rent, and you can blame the landlord for that.